AN INTERVIEW WITH WIN BLEVINS
By Steven Anderson LawOriginally published in 2000 on ReadWest Online Magazine.
RW: Sum up your new book, ravenShadow, for us.
WIN: It's about Joseph Blue Crow, a Lakota who wakes up, nearly forty years old, and realizes he's lost in his life. Alcoholic, divorced, suddenly unemployed, an outsider among his own people, an outsider among the whites-just plain lost. To turn that around, he quits drinking and returns to his traditional religion. He decides to join a pilgrimage to Wounded Knee, the bloody ground where his ancestors died. On the way, with the help of a medicine man, he journeys through visions to the original Wounded Knee. He sees the horror, the shame, all of it; and he gets to see his own grandmother being born. He discovers great truths about himself, his family, his people, and finds healing.
RW. What do you want readers to get from it?
WIN. Healing. Not just for red people-white people, all people. Nothing has been more painful for Americans throughout our history than the issue of race, during the era of slavery, during the Indian wars, during the Civil Rights Movement, all the time. Even today, ethnicity dominates our thinking when we make laws, when we write and read newspapers, when we broadcast and watch news on television, when we walk down the street at night. It's incorrect to talk about it, but race is the festering wound in American history. We need racial healing more than any other blessing.
I emphasize that the novel is about all races. One of its key elements is the romance of Joseph and a black woman. She mirrors many of his conflicts, and shows a dark side of the story.
RW. You're not Lakota-what gives you the right to write this story?
WIN. Everyone has the right to write every story. Mitakuye oyasin-this Lakota phrase is the center of Lakota religious thought, and it means, We are
all related. To me this says, We all, man and woman, red and white, young and old, able and disabled, we all have more in common than what separates us. Through empathy, compassion, experience, and imagination a writer can actually feel the sadness of a ten-year-old girl, the envy of a teenage boy, the thrill of first-time sex, the excitement of an adventurer, the grief of a
death, and so on. Then we use craft to re-create that on the page. To me, the fashionable tendency to think otherwise-to hold Hispanic stories strictly for Hispanics, stories of old age only for the aged, children's stories only for children-this is foolishness. We human beings are more alike than different, all of us. The future depends on that realization.
Also, I'm Irish, Cherokee, and Welsh, a descendant of three peoples who got their tails kicked. I learned about being an outsider from my mother's milk.
Also again, I am myself a Pipe carrier, a habitue of the sweat lodge, a seeker of visions.
To return to my main thought, through empathy human beings can understand each other deeply. With commitment, writers can do it especially well.
RW. Your West used to be the time of the mountain man, the days before the notorious cowtowns and gunfighting lawmen. But in ravenShadow you turn to the West in modern times. Why is this?
WIN. I have a passion for the West, all of it, not just a revered and idealized time in the past. We live today, and want and need to express how it feels to be men and women and walk the earth in our own time. So I am eager to write about this West, right now.
There's also a progression here for me. I was originally drawn to the stories of the west by the tales of mountain men and Indians told by a great teacher at the University of Missouri, John G. Neihardt, the author of Black Elk Speaks. The mountain men seemed to me wild and free and madly different from the conventional white folks of their century. They themselves were
drawn powerfully to Indian life. When I delved into that, I experienced for the first time a lifestyle that entranced me, a truly different way of looking at the world and of dwelling in it. Those ways of seeing and living survive today (though they don't yet thrive), and they cry out for understanding.
RW. The protagonist of ravenShadow, Joseph Blue Crow, has spent a large part of his life on the "White Road." How important is this experience to the strength of the story?
WIN. Joseph Blue Crow has been picked out, even before birth, to be a bearer of the old ways into future. He is to be held away from contact with white people, not even allowed to learn English. For more than twenty years, though, he makes a long detour in the other world, the white road. When he returns to the traditional ways of his people, he is uniquely able to grasp both worlds, and perhaps to integrate them. In that way he represents hope for the future, for both red and white peoples.
RW. Is Blue Crow's time "on the mountain" rare for a Lakota in modern times?
WIN. To go on the mountain, to do a vision quest, is far from common now. Yet many Lakota people do seek spiritual insight in this time-honored way. It is a mode of learning that reaches beyond the rational and orderly, that calls upon the subconscious, dreams, and the spirit. I myself have gone on the mountain often, and keep going.
RW. I want to shift back in time a little. Your novel, Stone Song: A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse, took many years to complete. Was writing this novel a great spiritual experience?
WIN. Writing Stone Song was... I hardly know what to say. I began in 1975 as a contemporary skeptical man, rationalist, egocentric, iconoclastic, irreligious. Twenty years later, when the book was published, going into
Crazy Horse's world had made me a different person--mystical and intuitive, compassionate (I hope), committed to seeing with the eye of the heart and
walking the good red road. I express my gratitude to the Lakota people in a small way by donating ten percent of my earnings from the book to Oglala
Lakota College.
RW. How do you compare the experience of writing Stone Song with that of ravenShadow?
WIN. They're different universes.
Stone Song is a historical novel about one of the great American heroes. There's a built-in audience for books about this mythical time of the American frontier. The writer must master a great body of fact and bring it
to life. He must also navigate through big landmarks that everyone knows-like the Fetterman massacre, the Battle of the little Big Horn, and the betrayal and murder of Crazy Horse. Beyond this, the task I set myself was to make this great man human, to see into his heart. I had to be daring in entering him, to trust my intuition, to grasp him whole and give him to the
reader vividly. The book is fundamentally an expression of my love for him, his people, and their way of seeing the world.
In ravenShadow, I've made a sharp turn in my writing and my career. It is my first contemporary book, and contemporary novels about the West (according to industry powers who believe they know) have a very different audience from historical novels. It's a look at living Lakota people, who don't seem at all mythic or romantic to most Americans. I wanted to look squarely at the degradation and despair on reservations today, and see through it and beyond it. To see how the old ways still offer redemptive power, even in desperate circumstances. To envision a way for the best of
the old and of the new, the red and the white, to meld into a better world.
In writing a contemporary novel I also got to write contemporary language, with all its slangy juices, and to draw pictures from my own daily life. That feels more exciting to me than reconstructing the past, however
well it's done.
RW. You write a lot about the Lakota people. Do you have a special affinity for them?
WIN. I feel a deep affinity for the Lakota, which rubbed off on me first from John G. Neihardt and increased hugely from years of getting to know them, both in books and in person. I feel affinity for all Indian people and indigenous peoples everywhere, and for all the world's outsiders. Perhaps this affinity is natural, since my Cherokee, Welsh, and Irish ancestors got
shoved aside by arrogantly dominant cultures. As a child I was acutely embarrassed by differences between me and others my age. I was a Southerner
in suburban St. Louis, teased about my soft, drawling speech; a kid who liked reading and playing music more than regular kid stuff; a youngster who was
simply too different. I think a lot of writers have similar feelings.
RW. To you, is writing a novel, or the experience of writing characters and creating their world, as strong as the bond you have with your family or friends, with your own world?
WIN. The usual first critical standard for a novelist is that he or she should have something to say. To me it's more important that he create another world, a mesmerizing universe of imagination to hang out in. When I'm creating this world, it's far brighter in my mind than the "real" world. I regret this in many ways. I've lost precious time with my children and my wife. I've lost time roaming in the natural world, feeling the sunlight and the rain, sitting on rocks, breathing the breeze. But I am what I am, a storyteller, a creator of imaginary worlds. I spend a lot of time there.
RW. Based on your education and experience, one might say you have the perfect background for a writer. But where does the heart of your story telling come from?
WIN. Maybe a psychiatrist could figure that out. I loved to read as a kid (the Bobsey twins and the Oz books were special favorites). I loved music, loved church and Bible stories. I loved the stories my dad and uncles told. Later I got educated in literature and in music. I came to love writers like E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and lots of others. Somehow this all added up to a passion for telling stories.
One more thought, important: When I'm writing a novel, my spirit feels alive and vibrant.
RW. Many writers of the West are concerned about the market and they focus a lot on the business of writing. How much attention are you giving to the subject?
WIN. I give mind, imagination, and the days of my life to telling stories the best I can. I hope people want to roam through the worlds I create. When they do, I am deeply delighted. I like meeting readers, and often enjoy talking about my work in interviews. Thinking of writing as a business involving a market and other economic considerations, that stuff makes my brain hurt, and it turns my stomach. I glance in that direction and rush back to writing.
RW. Now that ravenShadow has been released, what's next for Win Blevins?
WIN. I've adapted Stone Song as a movie for Jon Voight, who optioned it. I pray that we make a movie that is wildly beautiful and deeply true, and that it opens millions of hearts to an understanding of Crazy Horse and his people and their ways.
My current manuscript is another contemporary novel, this time set in the canyonlands of the Four Corners region, where I live now. It's populated by folks struggling to be good human beings, bad folks (those motivated by lust for money and power), the spirits of ancient pueblo dwellers, looters of ruins, a Navajo ranger (I'm in love with her- and she's as headstrong as my wife), a hundred and three-year-old mystic, and a smart buzzard who watches out for the land and its creatures. It's funny, romantic, nifty, inspiring, offbeat, impassioned, and a lot of fun.